Indigo: The Most Interesting Color of the Rainbow—Is “Nonfiction” Just Fake News?—Beyond Epistolary: Doctor’s Notes, Receipts, and Tweets—Alice Through the Looking Glass and Into a Really Nice Brownstone—Is Your Writer Persona Hunter S. Thompson?

Jess Jelsma Masterton is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she works as an Assistant Editor for the Cincinnati Review. She received her MFA in prose from the University of Alabama, where she interned and read for Black Warrior Review. In the summer of 2018, she was selected as a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Arkansas International, Catapult, CRAFT Literary, Entropy, Flyway, The Normal School, Penny Zine, The Rumpus, The Southern Review, Quarterly West, and various other publications. She has also been featured in The Heart podcast’s episode “It’s Not Me, It’s You.” You can find her online at jessejelsma.com or @jessejelsma.

Read Jess’s Work Here

“The Trouble with Angels: Taming a Halo of Unruly Hair”

“A Last-Minute Addendum”

“Cast Me Back Out to Sea”

“Stray”

“Frigid”

Listen to Jess Here

“The Long Night”

“It’s Not Me, It’s You”

Jess’s Picks

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta

Notes

• What are the best/worst/weirdest interview questions you’ve ever had to answer?
• Are you an Indigo Child?
• University of Alabama MFA
• Black Warrior Review
• Someday I’ll move to Alaska
• When is nonfiction fiction? ALWAYS
• I cannot stop talking about Educated,
• but Val and LaRee wish we all would.
• Lauren Groff
• Reading Year Reading List
• The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger (another law school grad)
• Has anyone taught a class on unreliable narrators in nonfiction?
• Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
• Another author I keep mentioning
• Eating Disorders: The Hysteria of the 90s?
• Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Susan Bordo
• “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Tweets Capturing Culture
• The child is named Jericho, not Marzipan.
• Goodnight Tweetheart
• The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel by Jeffrey Lewis
• Michael Fassbender. You are welcome.
• Is “the Montessori of MFA programs” a compliment or an insult? Discuss.
• The author I was thinking of was Hunter S. Thompson.
• Have you found your writer persona?

Fiction Nonfiction